Catch me if you can: Trapping scanning ribosomes in their footsteps

Ribosome profiling provides a snapshot of the mRNA positions of all elongating ribosomes in the cell. A new powerful enhancement of the technique, translation complex profile sequencing (TCP-seq), extends this mapping to scanning ribosomal complexes. In addition to its usefulness as a tool for studying the regulation of translation initiation, TCP-seq provides specific and powerful signatures of bona fide translation.